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farbrausch

The German PC group that stored recipes instead of data

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A German PC demo group founded in early 2000. Its 64K intro fr-08 won at The Party 2000; its offshoot .theprodukkt fitted a first-person shooter, .kkrieger, into 96K in 2004; and its 177K demo debris. won Breakpoint 2007. The trick behind all three was a tool that stores the steps an artist took rather than the finished textures and models. In 2012 the group published a decade of its tools' source code.

The file that won the 64K intro competition at The Party in Denmark in December 2000 was exactly 65,536 bytes long: 64 kilobytes to the byte. Inside it was a 3D demo with textured scenery and a soundtrack, and not one stored picture. “All the textures are generated, even those that look like photoshop,” one of its coders, Chaos, explained afterwards. The intro was fr-08: .the .product, and the readme signed its makers off as “Farb-rausch Consumer Consulting”, a mock company whose members were its “loyal Farbrausch Employees”. Over the next seven years the same people used the same idea to fit a first-person shooter into 96K and a city-wrecking demo into 177K.

Fast facts

  • From: Germany; founded early 2000.
  • Platform: Windows PCs.
  • Best known for: fr-08: .the .product (2000), fr-025: the popular demo (2003), .kkrieger (2004, as .theprodukkt) and fr-041: debris. (2007).
  • Members included: Chaos (Dierk Ohlerich), fiver2 (Thomas Mahlke), ryg (Fabian Giesen), kb (Tammo Hinrichs), giZMo (Christoph Muetze), wayfinder (Sebastian Grillmaier) and many others.
  • Still active: a farbrausch 8K intro placed fifth at Revision in 2026.

Beginnings

According to the scene database Demozoo, farbrausch was founded in early 2000 by present and former members of other groups, among them Smash Designs, Elitegroup, Teklords and Sanity, the Amiga group where Chaos had coded in the early 1990s. Every production carries an “fr-” number, starting with fr-01: lifestyle 600 in January 2000; fr-08 was number eight.

fr-08 and the tool behind it

The readme for fr-08 credits Chaos with “main demo and tool code, making it all possible”, and the word “tool” is the point. Chaos wrote the tool as well as the demo, and fiver2, credited with “concept, graphics, 3D, design, content and choreography”, made the pictures and models with it. The intro does not store them. It generates them each time it starts, which is why it opens with a progress bar. kb wrote a software synthesiser that plays the music in real time; Chaos said it was “incapable of playing samples of any kind”. ryg is credited as “compression technology supervisor”.

It was the start of a line of tools. ryg’s account of them mentions “the original fr-08 Generator” and Werkkzeug1; after that came GenThree, which the group wrote for the 64K intro Candytron (2003), and then Werkkzeug3, for which Chaos “threw away the scripting parts and most of the existing GUI, but kept the Operators”. A separate generator, RG2, made several of the group’s 64K intros of 2001–2003. Even at the time of Candytron, ryg wrote, “we were very clearly aiming at producing kkrieger”.

At Breakpoint 2003 in Germany the group took the PC demo competition with fr-025: the popular demo, 583 points to 485 for Kolor’s Relais, and Candytron came second in the PC 64K competition.

.theprodukkt and .kkrieger

.kkrieger was released under a new name, .theprodukkt, by four farbrausch members: fiver2 (concept, direction, textures and levels), Chaos (the editor, texture generator, game code and physics), giZMo (characters, animation and weapons) and ryg (the mesh generator, 3D engine and his executable compressor, kkrunchy). wayfinder made the music and sound effects, played by kb’s synthesiser. The game won the 96K game competition at Breakpoint 2004 with 334 points. Its executable is 97,280 bytes.

Computer Gaming World covered it in September 2004 as the “world’s smallest first-person shooter”, made by “a handful of guys from Hamburg”. The idea, it reported, went back to fiver2 noticing that he needed only “a few simple primitives and filters to create very realistic textures” in ordinary paint programs. Chaos told the magazine: “The editor is the key to [.kkrieger’s] quality… After all, artists can’t code; they need a good tool to make good graphics.” The game’s own readme took on the rumours head-on: “We do .not. have some kind of magical data compression machine… We merely store the individual steps employed by the artists to produce their textures and meshes.” It was mostly written in C++, not assembly language, and the team made no claim to have invented the techniques: “It’s rather a selection of useful operations and their parameters.”

The readme called .kkrieger the first chapter of a trilogy, with a final version to follow. .theprodukkt became a company, .theprodukkt GmbH, which in 2007 released a texture-making version of its tool to other developers as .werkkzeug3 Texture Edition.

debris.

At Breakpoint 2007 the group won the PC demo competition again, with fr-041: debris., a journey through a city that twists, collapses and flies apart. It scored 1,474 points, well ahead of Andromeda’s Noumenon on 815. It ran on the Werkkzeug3 and .kkrieger engine, and its executable was 177K.

The source release

In April 2012 farbrausch published its tools on GitHub as “pretty much a history of Farbrausch tools 2001-2011”: Werkkzeug3 and Werkkzeug4, GenThree, RG2, kb’s V2 synthesiser, two versions of kkrunchy, a texture generator called OpenKTG, and the source data for debris. and .kkrieger’s engine branch. “This is not cleaned up,” the readme warned. “This is the raw deal, some from old hard drives, some fresh from various SVN repositories.” Each part is either in the public domain or under a BSD licence. The readme adds that the most recent framework and tool, Altona and Werkkzeug4, had “seen heavy duty use in several companies”.

Later years

The group kept releasing. Demozoo lists farbrausch productions through the 2010s and 2020s, including fr-099: Aphelion, which it records as winning the combined PC demo competition at Underground Conference in 2020. At Revision 2026, in Saarbrücken, the 8K intro fr-079: Zero Distance came fifth.

Sources

See also

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